Radiation may not be needed for people undergoing surgery for rectal cancer, a large clinical trial has shown. A combination of two chemotherapy drugs before surgery appears to be as effective as chemotherapy with radiation and may spare patients from long-term side effects.
A large clinical trial has shown that a treatment regimen including cyclophosphamide better protects against graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) after an allogeneic stem cell transplant than the standard two-drug regimen in people with blood cancers.
New findings from the ZUMA-7 trial show that the CAR T-cell therapy axicabtagene ciloleucel (Yescarta) improved survival for people with large B-cell lymphoma that was not responding to initial treatment or had quickly come back.
In the ADAURA clinical trial, people with early-stage lung cancer treated with osimertinib (Tagrisso) after surgery lived longer than people treated with a placebo after surgery. Despite some criticisms about its design, the trial is expected to change patient care.
In this video, Dr. Cecilia Monge discusses the ongoing approaches used for liver cancer clinical trials that are available at NCI’s Center for Cancer Research.
Clinical Trials Information for Patients and Caregivers
Randomization, in which people are assigned to groups by chance, helps prevent bias. Bias occurs when a trial's results are affected by human choices or other factors not related to the treatment being tested.
Placebos are inactive substances or procedures that look the same, and are given the same way, as an active drug or treatment being tested. Placebos are only used in cancer clinical trials when there is no standard treatment to compare an experimental therapy with. Or they may be used in trials that compare standard treatment plus a placebo with standard treatment plus a new treatment.
This phase 2 clinical trial will test whether adding metformin, a drug commonly used to treat diabetes, to standard non-surgical treatment with megestrol acetate will help prevent a precancerous condition called endometrial intraepithelial neoplasia from turning into endometrial cancer.
This phase 2 trial will test the effectiveness of dostarlimab (Jemperli), an immunotherapy drug, as an initial treatment in people with advanced solid tumors with a genetic change called mismatch repair deficiency. Doctors want to see if treatment with dostarlimab for 6 months will shrink or completely kill tumors.
This phase 1 trial will test CAR T-cell therapy that targets a protein called GPC3 found on the surface of advanced liver cancer cells. People with liver cancer that has GPC3 and that has not improved with chemotherapy will undergo the immunotherapy procedure. Doctors want to see if CAR T-cell therapy using T cells genetically modified to recognize GPC3 is safe.
